Jo McInerney’s third success with ‘re: Virals’ on the THF website

For the third time this month, Australian haiku poet Jo McInerney has been honoured by having her response chosen as the winner in the ‘re: Virals’ segment on The Haiku Foundation website. Jo’s evaluation of Janice M. Bostok’s ‘envelope’ monoku can be found below, preceded by another commentary from fellow Australian haiku poet Marietta McGregor.

As the weekly winner of ‘re: Virals’, Jo has chosen the following haiku for comment:

dry wheat grass . . .
the whiteness of
a child dying

— Robert D. Wilson, ‘A Lousy Mirror’ (2011)

For posting on Friday morning (Eastern US Time) – as before – responses to Robert D. Wilson’s haiku must be received online by midnight Tuesday (New York time). Contributors need to submit through the THF’s Contact Box – using a subject header of “re: Virals” – with guidelines available through this link:

‘This haiku begins with the initially prosaic image of the ‘opening of an envelope’. Then it quickly reveals its true colours: like so many of Janice Bostok’s poems, it reaches sublime heights of sensuality. We see the poet sliding a thumb into the envelope, clearly thinking about how the missive has been sealed — with the tongue of a lover, two slow licks the length of the gum. There’s a sense of anticipation, regarding both the letter and the sensation of the touch and moistness of those sealing lips.

‘Of course, another reading could be that some mystery has been penetrated, something heretofore hidden from the poet which will now be revealed when this letter is opened. The sliding sibilance of the s serves to heighten the anticipation.

‘Sad to say, it’s a museum piece as well — in the age of self-adhesive envelopes, no-one writing about letter-opening will ever call to mind that slow sensual caress of a tongue on funny-tasting gum!’

‘However, pride of place belongs to Jo McInerney’s keen dissection of the poem’s many parts:

‘The meaning of Bostok’s monoku unfolds or evolves over the course of the line in a way peculiar to some one-liners. They are poems of transformation, rather like some of Escher’s etchings, where the images shapeshift across the page, morphing from one form to another, overlapping as they do so.

‘It opens by calling attention to an ‘envelope’. The word is not preceded by an article; it is almost as though the envelope were being addressed (pun not intended). There is an inevitable pause after the first word. If this were a three-line haiku, this single word would occupy the first line. What does the pause do? Create a sense of expectancy; suggest the potential importance of the message within? Imply that the speaker has recognised the handwriting, knows from whom this is sent? Yes, on all counts, I think. Then there is an apparently simple action. The envelope is being unsealed, but for just a second there is the possibility the speaker’s thumb has been cut, ‘my thumb slips open’. Paper cut? Something worse? There is a fleeting suggestion of pain. But no, it is ‘the seal’ of the envelope that is being broken. Yet the previous ‘misreading’ leaves an after-image. The letter has significance, perhaps the capacity to wound. Then the poem delivers its greatest surprise, the seal that is being opened is ‘the seal of his tongue’.

‘The ‘seal of his tongue’ could mean no more than his silence, but when ‘thumb’ and ‘tongue’ are suddenly brought together the result is startlingly sexual. Opening an envelope has been transformed into part of an act of lovemaking. On a literal level the description is no more than accurate — the speaker’s thumb is opening an envelope sealed by the tongue of the man who sent it. However, that is not the predominant image the monoku creates. ‘Thumb” and ‘tongue’ seem to touch in the same intimate space. Interestingly, a penetrative role has been assigned to the apparently female speaker. Indeed, the more the haiku is considered the more the various actions potentially performed by each lover challenge the reader’s erotic imagination.

‘For the time at which it was written, perhaps for any time, this is an audacious haiku, both in form and content. However, Bostok’s one-liner is not only a witty wordplay intended to amuse. It is a revelation of the multiple dimensions of intimacy and their capacity to be embodied in word.’